Matteo Massagrande: In Dialogue with Stanley Spencer

For some, Stanley Spencer’s work has become synonymous with love affairs, the tragic consequences of which led to some of the most avant-garde evocations of the human body of its day. But the visual union of these two artists is a very different sort of ‘love affair’, to use the words of Massagrande. Having first encountered Spencer’s work over 40 years ago, he harboured a desire to understand the artist more fully, both aesthetically and intellectually, and for Massagrande this could only be realised through his own act of creation. Too modest himself to cast this process in Platonic terms, for me he embodies the quest for the Ideal:

 

Both artists are visionaries, and through their own singularity of expression create an eloquent dialectic between humanity and mystery which informs and asserts our own experience of life and nature. Spencer wrote that ‘everything has a double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together’ (1956, BBC documentary). His genius was borne out of a fusion of three entities, Cookham, religion and sex, each component informing and fused with the other. Cookham was Spencer’s home village in the Berkshire countryside, on the banks of the river Thames - his locusamoenus. As his ‘heaven on earth’ it was quite natural that Cookham should provide both the backdrop and inspiration for both the seen and the unseen in his art. The river, the rolling fields and meadows, as well as the maze of lanes, walls and hedges in the village were reproduced with apparent photographic exactitude, but with a visionary spirit. The walls and hedges were particularly interesting to Spencer; his desire to look over them gave him a ‘feeling of wonder at what was on the other side’. His brother Gilbert spoke about ‘hidden bits of Cookham as remote as the Milky Way’, and Spencer himself had described a yew tree in his garden in cosmic terms: “There was a lovely yew tree, the kind of yew tree that branches out from the base & goes out in, making a most lovely shape … & behind that you could see the walnut tree going up, soaring away for ever like a huge great sort of planet Jupiter” (1955, BBC Radio).

As man and artist, Spencer, was fraught with contradictions. Likewise in his paintings of the natural world, there is an ebb and flow between numerous perceived tensions: the divine and the everyday, the seen and the unseen, description and abstraction, and observation and memory. But like the most powerful literature, film or music, tension is an essential part of creating a masterpiece. For him nature was part of the visionary, and the natural world fed into and informed his narrative work. Nature was not only a thing of beauty and solace, but an intrinsic part of his spiritual world.

Massagrande is equally compelled by this notion of the ‘void’ (Spencer’s ‘unseen’). He wrote: “There are two types of painters, those who paint the ‘full’, for example Freud, and those who paint the ‘void’… [this] means painting everything needed so that the viewer can imagine the subject that the painter had in mind, with their ability to interpret”.

For both artists the spiritual weight of childhood is a powerful force in their work. Earlier works by Massagrande are haunting evocations of an Italian countryside villa in which he spent childhood holidays, and where he could not resist the temptation to explore the vacant rooms. These spaces are not literal but lyrical evocations of a now lost childhood, something spiritual and metaphysical, serving as visual explorations of his soul. As such, these works are not narrative, but meditative, exploring the ‘essence of life as the artist perceives it’.

Like Spencer, his childhood was underlined by a religious observance which later developed into a deeper appreciation of the meaning of divinity: in his own words ‘[the feeling] deep inside yourself the existence of a superior being that regulates every harmony’. Both artists were equally conditioned by the literary and intellectual milieu of home; for Spencer this was a daily diet of Bible readings, bolstered by the work of John Donne and Thomas Traherne, as well as a vast range of fiction. Massagrande’s life has seen equally deep literary immersion, but for him all cultural disciplines (literature, art, music and philosophy) would be nothing without the harmoniacaelestis, which he describes as ‘the smell of cut grass, of fresh bread, of hands that have worked a lifetime, of rain… daily life. The origin of my painting is life itself which for me is the most beautiful form of poetry.’

A highlight of Spencer’s student days at the Slade School of Art (1908-12) were Roger Fry’s lectures on the Old Masters, and visits to the National Gallery, London. His work at this time and in some later phases, was deeply informed by the spirit and technique of the Italian ‘Primitives’ – in particular, Giotto and Orcagna. It is a happy coincidence, therefore, that in turn, an Italian ‘new master’ should be drawn to this very English artist, his work a living link between the past and present.

And as one died, the other was born; the fire of genius never dies, it only changes hands.

Trustee and Curator, Stanley Spencer Gallery

 

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